Prof. Althouse has an excellent, non-partisan post on John Kerry that both raises and answers questions about him. However, the questions that she raises are different from those that she answers, so it would be interesting to see what response there is to the former.
First, on the subject of Kerry's intelligence, which appears to be assumed to much greater than Bush's by just about everyone who's not rabidly in support of the President:
We keep hearing about Kerry's ability to deal with "nuance" and "complexity," but could it be that this is spin, and the truth is he actually doesn't think clearly? We know he doesn't speak clearly: he can't get to the point, and he often strays off-topic. We keep hearing that he's "thoughtful," implying that he takes a long time to think things through. Another way of putting that is that he's slow.There has been so much talk about how dumb Bush supposedly is, that it's surely fair to ask about Kerry's mental capacity. What were his undergraduate and law school GPAs? What was his LSAT score? If we don't hear the answer, I think, we ought to assume the numbers are fairly low.
Actually, in a part prior to what I've excerpted, Prof. Althouse wonders why Kerry went to Boston College for law school, not Harvard. One thing that I would add to Prof. Althouse analysis is that regardless of what anyone else thinks about the relative merits of Boston College vs. Harvard, doesn't Kerry seem exactly like the kind of person who would think that Harvard is more desirable?
However, Prof. Althouse goes on to defend Kerry from some new accusation that's lurking in some of the nastier parts of the Internet:
As to the question whether Kerry was really a war hero or some sort of war villain, the other and much nastier question that is being asked today, I will only note that if these charges were true, why didn't they come out back when Kerry was conspicuously opposing the Vietnam war and relying on his hero reputation for credibility?
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